As is known, tubular knitted articles, such as for example hosiery, are generally produced by means of circular hosiery knitting machines and are unloaded from the machine with both of their axial ends open.
In the case of hosiery items, after their unloading from the machine that is produced them, it is necessary to close the toe, an operation that is performed by means of sewing or looping machines.
Since this operation requires the use of additional machines and labor, which affects significantly the overall production costs of hosiery, different techniques have been proposed to automate the closing of the toe of hosiery items or, more generally, the closing of an axial end of tubular knitted articles produced with circular knitting machines for hosiery or the like.
The several techniques proposed up to now can be divided into two main categories: a first category, which comprises techniques based on performing the closure directly on the machine that produces the article, at the beginning or at the end of its production, and a second category, which comprises techniques based on performing closure in a specifically provided sewing or looping station, which is spaced from the machine for producing the article.
The first category suffers the drawback that it limits significantly the productivity of the machines, since the closing operation requires a certain time during which the machine cannot produce a new article.
The second category, to which for example the technique disclosed in EP 0942 086 belongs, is able to obviate this problem at least partially, since the productive potential of the machines is penalized only as regards the time required to remove the article from the machine that produced it, which is the time after which the machine can begin the production of a new article while the preceding article is subjected to sewing or looping.
However, the operations for transferring the article from the production machine to the looping station often require the use of complex apparatuses that must ensure extremely precise operation.
In the use of these apparatuses, it has been observed that the operation of picking up the article from the needles of the machine that produced it is particularly critical, since it affects significantly the overall transfer times of the article and is not always capable of ensuring the required precision.